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2018 Talent Acquisition Trends 1 3

With an unemployment rate of 3.7%, the lowest in the U.S. Labor Market since 1969, companies are competing to hire from a small talent pool, making it more challenging than ever to find the right people to fill your openings. In a tight labor market like this, investing in your current staff’s knowledge and development is easier than hiring new people.

According to SHRM, 60% of a company’s entire workforce will leave a company within four years if the company has no formal process for ongoing training and career development. SHRM also found that companies with an engaging onboarding program retain 91% of their first-year workers. So how can companies retain employees longer and create a professional development program for them?

The answer is investing in their skills. Your company can benefit from skills testing during ongoing training and career development and use skills testing for hiring and developing your workforce.

Why integrate skills testing in your training program?

The current business world has a growing need for skilled workers. This reality is one of the reasons why businesses are empowering their workforce with specialized skills training in leadership, workplace culture, targeted goals, and more.

Here are the benefits of integrating skills testing in your training program:

  • Increased morale and productivity as employees feel appreciated when they receive personalized training and are, therefore, more likely to feel fulfilled at work.
  • A more skilled workforce, since personalized training, helps employees close gaps in their skill sets by getting the skills they need to do their work better.
  • Employee retention and reduced turnover as employees continue to develop their expertise and reach their professional goals within the company.
  • Less time wasted since personalized training doesn’t try to force everyone into a single training course that may not complement their learning style.
  • More satisfied customers who are receiving the services they need from better-trained employees — a stronger workforce leads to increased competitiveness in your industry.
  • A growth-mindset among the trained staff, which will organically inspire other employees to want to take advantage of personalized training themselves.

How can you use skills testing to develop your workforce?

Today, every organization faces a big challenge: to bridge gaps in skill, mostly due to the accelerating pace of technology. A skill gap is a gap between what employers expect in terms of productivity from their employees and what employees can do when they walk into the job. The mismatch between the organization’s skill needs and the current capabilities of its workforce negatively impacts the company, usually by delays in product releases, lowered customer satisfaction, loss of profit, and bad reviews. This situation means that skills gaps carry a huge risk for organizations.

One way to mitigate this risk and bridge the skills gaps is to integrate skills training in your employee career development. You could do that through skills testing simulations. Because they are interactive and immersive and mimic real-life situations, simulations are excellent for identifying skills gaps and helping employees close any gaps that may exist as well as improve their skills. They effectively help trainees learn everything they need to learn much faster. The eSkill assessment platform simulates different situations for which employees need training, and then scans the individual employee responses, integrating their scores into a global report that tracks the effectiveness of the training program as a whole. Here are eSkill’s recommendations for using skills testing to develop your workforce:

  1. Assess your employees to figure out who among them needs training.
  2. Agree upon and define each employee’s goals and targets.
  3. Design personalized skills training that is dynamic, interactive, and easily accessible from anywhere (and on any device).
  4. Re-evaluate each employee’s progress with post-training skills assessments until the skills gaps have been closed.

These recommendations benefit both employers and employees by increasing productivity, improving retention, and making companies more competitive in the marketplace as their employees learn skills needed to stay ahead of the curve. Skills assessments can determine the specific skills gaps employees have, so you can train them in the best possible way.

Everyone agrees that training will elevate employees’ knowledge and their ability to execute tasks with greater skills, but how do you know if the training modules you chose are working? Our test advisors help you design a pre- and post-training skills assessment program that makes the most of your training investment.

With eSkill, you can:

  • select or customize relevant, valid tests of any length from over 600 subjects and simulations
  • view score reports that show specific knowledge gaps for hiring or training decisions
  • have a dedicated, U.S.-based Client Success Manager to help with your test designs and implementations
  • benefit from our nearly 20-year history of EEOC compliance
  • have data to support and legally defend hiring, training and promotion decisions

Our dedicated Client Success Managers are trained to help you design the best tests for your objectives and optimize your testing workflow, and our tech support is available 24/7/365.

REQUEST A LIVE DEMO HERE

Have you implemented personalized training with skills testing in your organization? Let us know in the comments below.

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